Classical Music | Music for Duo

Recorded on 04/08/2009, uploaded on 06/16/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Sixteen years passed between the composition of Mendelssohn’s concert overture and incidental music for William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After a successful production in 1841 of Sophecles’s Antigone with music composed by Mendelssohn, King Frederick William IV of Prussia commissioned the composer to write incidental music for other plays he enjoyed—among which was Shakespeare’s play. Mendelssohn took the concert overture he had composed in 1826 as a starting point and added thirteen numbers following it. Some are instrumental works serving as intermezzos between the play’s acts; others are melodramas performed during certain scenes with the purpose of enhancing Shakespeare’s text. Mendelssohn’s music received its premiere with a production of the play in Potsdam on October 14^th, 1843.

The first number, a Scherzo in G minor, fills the role of an intermezzo between Acts I and II of the play. Sprightly and dance-like, the opening four-bar theme forms the basis of much of the Scherzo’s music, melodically and rhythmically. A second independent theme in B flat major follows later in the strings. The movement unfolds as a sonata form with the dance-like motif of the first measure predominating throughout the development section, tossed between the woodwinds and strings. A chromatic scale beginning in the basses and rising up through the entire string section to the violins marks the arrival of the recapitulation. The Scherzo leads directly into the follow a number, a melodrama that accompanies the opening of the second Act.      Joseph DuBose